When the Child Becomes the Parent

Mothering Mother: A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir by Carol D. O'Dell


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Each experience with Alzheimer's (or other dementia) is individual and unique, but there are many connecting points for anyone who cares for the elderly. Both of my parents are now gone, but I had a little trouble relating to this book because my experience was so different. O'Dell's mother adopted her when she was a child. Her mother was a preacher who occasionally slapped her around. O'Dell was rebellious as a teen. When O'Dell's husband was transferred out of state and there was no one to care for her mother who already had Parkinson's, they took her along, building a MIL apartment on their new house. O'Dell had to do all the work of caring for her mother as she became more enfeebled. This is so far from what was my situation.
O'Dell's desire to be a good daughter at the expense of her own happiness and the comfort of her own husband and children makes my martyr-complex look subatomic. (I go around telling people how lucky I had it and I was lucky. I had a devoted husband who did all the work for me and my parents had enough money so that they could afford some in-home help until their medical conditions called for Medicare to take over for a brief period. Sure, I was miserable and had to resort to prescription happy pills because it's just so goddam sad to see your parents not recognize you anymore. But Mom's dementia lasted almost exactly one year and Dad was able to live on his own with minimal help until the last year.) One starts to wonder if she protests too much. Or perhaps she tried to make up for her rebellious phase.
The writing is not stellar, but this is a real person talking about real things that happened, not some manipulative poet trying to wring the last tear out of you. I recall one instance of "Block that metaphor!" as the New Yorker will have it. There is an extended period after her mother dies that I feel drags on. This is probably because the much-anticipated event (and I'm speaking from personal experience here, my dad was 101 when he died) is still a shock when it happens and you don't really get around to mourning until months later. Then the things that set you off are the oblique ones you didn't see coming and hadn't built up any defenses for. Still, you've gotcher Climax and then your Denouement and the latter is supposed to be either shorter than the one in this book or more piquant.

As a side-note, the jacket blurb said that O'Dell taught creative writing and was published in some Chicken Soup compilation about sisters. I know she has 3 daughters, but I thought that was a nice juxtaposition considering she grew up as an adopted "only child." Ha,ha, I said to myself, creative writing and only child writing about sisters. Ha. [As an even side-r note, I consider the perpetrators of the Chicken Soup books to be utterly depraved, devoid of any conscience or taste. Not the writers, who are only literary whores, but the pimps and shills that foist them on the public. Just my opinion! La la la!:]

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My parents while they still had all their marbles.

A Psychological Demi-Semi-Hemi-Thriller

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a good read. Instead of figuring out whodunnit, we are taxed with whosolvzit. We have an omniscient view of the murder from soup to nuts. We see the situation forming, we see the murderer and the victim do their dance until they inevitably come together and the murderer spins away to get on with life. Then we wait while we wonder if the murderer will be discovered and we sort of hope not. Like most cozies, the victim seems to have deserved something, if not actual death. Rendell has manipulated our feelings and, in fact, one of the characters unwittingly discusses the the core at the center of the nub of the gist of this story: when is murder not murder? When is it not a sin? When does a murderer not deserve punishment? Is this even possible?
We also see how a murder investigation destroys the social fabric. Neighbors no longer trust each other. There's an amusing side-story of a closeted gay MP who tries to get himself a "beard" but the murder affects this as well. As in any good cozy, true tragedy is skirted, the gore is limited, and the world is righted in the end.

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Supersense Me!

SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce Hood


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was an eminently readable book about a fascinating topic. Hood posits that supernatural thinking (which covers a wide range of beliefs from religion to the feeling that someone is looking at you) is one of the bag of tricks in all human brains that came to us thanks to evolution. Is it possible to be free from it? Probably not, and this Supersense has its use in creating a sense of community in people, in sorting, in categorizing. Religion, it seems, is just a bonus. I read a review about this book on The Friendly Atheist's blog and snagged a Kindle version immediately. I might have to get hard copy of it for reference, because flipping through a Kindle isn't the cakewalk I'd like it to be.
Hood's prose is clear enough for anyone to understand (unusual in an academic), and while he does tend to repeat himself, I did not find this annoying, especially in picking it up and reading it in short bursts. It helps to be reminded of what he talked about in previous chapters. So much of this book is meaty information that I highlighted most of it. I recommend it for atheists and theists alike.
For me, it was an eyeopener to realize that the rabblerousers decrying gay marriage, etc. were using a time-honored method of improving community cohesiveness by appealing to a visceral sense of disgust. Sure, you can also build community on positive beliefs, but it's so much easier to manipulate people using disgust. This opens a path for rebuttal, a chance to show you're taking the high road. Okay, maybe that's just me.

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